9/11 skeptics say Julian Assange being manipulated by the CIA

Various 9/11 truthers are changing their previously positive opinion of Julian Assange and Wikileaks. He is now being disowned by this clique and even being regarded as a paid agent.

Regular readers of the press will be aware that supporters of recent decisions by Wikileaks and Julian Assange to publish thousands of classified documents concerning American military and intelligence activities - much to the ire of American authorities - sometimes turn out to be supporters of conspiracy theories on 9/11 too, basing their claims on the assumption that governments hide things from us.

This phenomena – ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ - may explain why some of them, like the French truther site reopen911.info, even offered a sort of unofficial sponsorship to Wikileaks by posting the Wikileaks logo as a permanent feature of its front page.

But the love affair may now be over if one is to listen to recent Internet buzz on 9/11 truther sites and interviews given by 9/11 skeptics, says conspiracywatch.info, a French source of information for those seeking to debunk 9/11 and other conspiracy groups. The site says that the Truth Movement is now disowning Assange on the grounds that he has been compromised by the CIA and taken for a ride by American government disinformation.

Three major indicators have in their view discredited him according to an editorial on ReOpen911. They say that Assange, who they describe as "mysterious", has never been a 9/11 conspiracy supporter and that he has even publicly criticized conspiracists. Also, he has never published anything which even remotely supports the truthers’ arguments. This is known to have rankled truther organizations. The final –and logical conclusion according to truthers – argument is that the fact that the US government has not taken robust steps to stop Wikipedia and that Assange is said to be being more careful about cleaning up proposed new documents before putting them online suggests that he is being manipulated. The manipulation is said to be that the documents originally given to him were leaked deliberately by the CIA in an effort to give him and other critics of US policy in Afghanistan and elsewhere the impression that they had a ‘scoop.’ But the theory goes that the documents contained nothing that was not already known.

ReOpen911 claims that the CIA and other intelligence agencies are trying to discredit Assange by persuading him unconsciously to publish relatively worthless “leaked” documents in order that his future ‘scoops’ not be taken seriously. A second alleged benefit for the CIA is that the Wikileaks issue is deflecting attention from large-scale government-organised drug trafficking out of Afghanistan. The editorial also claims that Daniel Ellsberg, the CIA analyst at the origin of the ‘Pentagon Papers’ scandal in the 1970’s, has a list of confidential documents relative to 9/11, and which are purported to contain evidence of governments being aware of the imminence of the attacks, which he would like Wikipedia to publish, but they haven’t.

Another truther who has come out against Assange is Webster Tarpley, who in a one-hour interview given for the Alex Jones Channel even accused Assange of being a paid CIA agent. Tarpley claimed that the same thing was true, and for the same kind of reasons, for Ellsberg.

Thierry Meyssan is a French conspiracist who was declared persona non-grata in the United States after writing a book in which he claimed that 9/11 was orchestrated by George Bush, and he too has denounced Assange as being part of an American government “political diversion.”

Finally, well-known American conspiracy theorist Wayne Madsen is quoted as saying in March that the CIA, the Rothschild Bank, Goldman-Sachs, the Mossad and wealthy businessman George Soros were all implicated in a vast campaign of manipulation destined to fool Assange into thinking he was onto something big.

So how is it that Julian Assange has been transformed by truthers from being a victim of plots to kill him and a fellow anti-establishment seeker into a, patsy, or a CIA agent, or an enemy of 9/11 skeptics?

Conspiracywatch says the answer is obvious. They claim that some of the documents revealed by or in the possession of Wikileaks contain embarrassing content for truthers by lifting a corner of the cover protecting Hamid Gul, the ex-Head of the Pakistani Secret Services, who the truthers have always said they value as “a source.” The documents suggest that he may have secretly supported both the Taliban and AlQaida. Gul has often accused the CIA and Mossad of being behind the 9/11 attacks.

So the dilemma for truthers, according to Conspiracy Watch, is how to reconcile the emerging evidence that Gal has always supported the Taliban and Al-Qaida in their war against the West with the dual fact that he has supported Truthers too, most of whom claim that 9/11 had nothing to do with the Taliban and Al Qaida, but everything to do with George Bush?

And that dilemma, according to Conspiracy Watch, is partially due to the published content of Assange’s documents and that of documents to come.